


They call this bravery

by wolfsan11



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Fear, Grief, Hopeful Ending, Introspection, Keith (Voltron)-centric, Keith being Keith, M/M, More implied Sheith really, Season 4 Finale, Self-Sacrifice, VLD S4, in other words help this boy pls
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-31
Updated: 2017-12-31
Packaged: 2019-02-24 15:04:10
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,474
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13216308
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/wolfsan11/pseuds/wolfsan11
Summary: Keith had never really given much thought into how he would die. An explosive blaze does seem awfully fitting though. And if it means saving his friends? Then he's all for it.





	They call this bravery

**Author's Note:**

> I've had this sitting for a while and I hated it, and today was a bad day which lead to me pouring my emotions into this and finishing it off. It's not my best and not actually that angsty, I do hope you...enjoy it, for lack of a better word. Thanks for reading <3

He has seconds to make the decision, and it takes only one to know he’ll go through with it. Maybe what’s most surprising is that his mind doesn't immediately go to Shiro or the team. Not at first anyway.

Gritted teeth hold back a clamour of curses. Memories pinch and burn at him. Keith imagines it’s a little like having glass embedded deep under his skin; painful, cutting an unwanted mess out of him. Sweat sluices down his neck, his heart beating and flaying at his ribs, but he can’t afford to lose focus now. The lights bleed over from tame purple to a deep red and that should have brought him some comfort for all its familiarity, but he hasn't flown Red in so long and the colour leaves him feeling displaced. He's an imposter, draped in lost echoes of heroism.

This isn’t fair. This isn’t _fair_. This isn’t how it’s meant to go.

But it is what it is.

Keith takes a deep breath. There’s a loud rattle as loose parts of his craft shift with his movements, debris sliding from right to left in the inertia of a hard turn. His stomach swoops as he dives and somewhere in that moment, fraught with nerves, all-consuming fear and the sting in his eyes, he remembers.

He remembers the fond brush of fingers through his hair, dislodging sand from the roots. He remembers paper crinkling beneath his fingers, endless lines of ink, of text that he could not yet read. He remember his father’s murmurs of excitement, the warmth of his voice and touch.

He remembers Cassini. All of it had seemed so easy back then.

“The launch was October 15,” his father had said, unfailingly, every time he'd asked. “And then you were born just 8 days after, Comet. Thundering into our house with all your wailing.”

With the wonder injected into those tales by his father, the Cassini-Hugyens mission had been something of a constant in his early years. But what had started out as nothing more than a fleeting fascination seeped over into a desperate vice once his father disappeared.

What followed was restless nights of following the probe’s journey, from Earth to Mars and Venus, farther out all the way to Saturn and its moons. Countless news clippings carefully pasted into journals, and one boy poring with a maddened need over every piece of information that was released to the public.

He hadn’t known it at the time, why he did what he did. Only that it was a game, no, a competition against himself. Cassini was the one thing Keith had left of his father, like the blade that he stubbornly refused to let anyone else touch. It was the logic of a child who’d been left adrift: that if he tried hard enough, if he held fast to that memory of his father, then maybe things would be alright. Maybe he would be proud of Keith. Maybe he would come back and maybe Keith could make up for whatever he’d done to drive him away.

And somewhere along the way, that became a goal. Space was a concrete destination, a place he could aim towards.

No one had quite understood his motives, why he remained so hung up on the mission and all that it encompassed. Why he was so intense about these things. Why he couldn’t seem to let go.

The hardest part was realising no one cared to know.

No one until Shiro.

Because Shiro had been another of those kids; the ones who grew up with the stories of space missions and science fiction lighting their eyes, the ones who consumed every news article and video clip they could get their hands on, the ones who got in trouble at school for not doing their homework because they’d been up too late watching late night shows or reading up on the probe’s findings.

He’d rambled about it to Keith, about how he’d seen the launch at all of 6 years old, watching the grainy feed on his neighbour’s shitty television. How it’d set off his obsession with NASA and the skies, and how he’d marked himself down early for the astronaut track and nothing more. Their motives were different, but Shiro had understood him, taken the time to do so when no one else ever had. Galaxy Garrison was the tiniest divergence for Shiro but even so, he’d been moving headlong towards his dreams.

Then Shiro had died.

And months later, Cassini had taken its final dive towards Saturn, burning out and flickering into nothing but a dusty old childhood memory to be sneered at.

For a while, Keith had broken something inside himself, yelling hoarsely at the skies to know if it had been worth it. If any of it had been worth it. But he’d known the answer even then, even while he tore wounds into his fists and holes into his heart. He’d known, because he’d known Shiro too. Understood him in a way that left most others wanting.

He’d been a defect compass, losing his way with neither of his poles there to guide him.

But Shiro had come back, somehow, like they’d fallen in to a storybook where death was nothing but a distant notion. It was the second chance he’d learned to stop hoping for, and Keith had taken it and run. Any remaining barriers between them had broken, hard and fast, till there was no mistaking what they meant for each other. Shiro had understood him way back then and Keith had done his best to do the same for him on his return, to protect the man who was everything to him.

And if the last few months of loss and grief, of miscommunication and tension had put a wedge between them, well. There's an explanation for that, somewhere.

He has to understand now too, Keith thinks. The idea that Shiro wouldn't is unfeasible. It’s terrifying. He _has_ to understand now.

Not that Keith’s giving him any choice.

Because, there, in that Galra fighter ship, in a moment so weighted, it’s terribly simple to make the decision; to shove the levers forward and down and signify the start of his end. Alarms blare through the cockpit of his failing craft but he pays them no mind.

Stars blur into mere streaks, the sounds of combat and Matt’s protests and his team’s cries of panic dying down into senseless white noise as he gazes down the narrow path before him. All that’s left for him is to hold on. There’s some room for regret too, for all the times he will never live.

His lungs are tight, his chest heaving like he can't get enough air from the panic sewing his throat shut, but he crushes it away with a single-minded need to not lose control. After Kerberos, there’d been candle light vigils and remembrances. Tributes to the fallen, but nothing left of them to bury.

Keith thinks over it mechanically, dispassionately, biting down on a trembling lip. He used to imagine his funeral. He used to wonder if there would be anyone to mourn him and he'd come to the inevitable conclusion that after Shiro, there was no one.

Maybe a month ago, when he was still one of seven, he could have told himself he was wrong.

But then he wouldn’t be here, diving towards certain death to save his team and the universe. A month back, he would have been right there with them, desperately fleeing out of range of the bomb.

So perhaps there’s some workings of fate in that. Perhaps this is what he'd always been meant for. It made sense. In the end, Keith only knows this much.

Nothing was worth Shiro’s pain . . . except this. Only this.

If it meant saving Shiro’s life and that of the team, if all he had to do was to give his in exchange, then he'd do it, every time, a thousand times over.

The levers strain in his hands, pressure growing as the built-in AI tries to pull him out of the steep decline. He holds on, refusing to quit. This, at least, is something even he can’t mess up. For once, no one else will have to take the fall. For once, he won't be the one left behind. If that's considered selfish then so fucking be it.

This is his grand finale.

Keith ducks his head and closes his eyes.

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Flames flicker around the remains of the barrier but they quickly fade, put out with no fuel to sustain them.

Keith's heart squeezes tight, almost as tight as he holds the controls in a bid to keep himself upright. He can't quite seem to catch his breath.

But he's alive.

He thinks it might be okay to take that as a sign.

**Author's Note:**

> A lovely person made my day better and tbh...I guess I wanted to make this a not so sad thing. This one's for you Tamara <3 ;;


End file.
